The Argentine Chaco eco-region is a forest biome of unique importance due to
its continuity in terms of area, and biodiversity treasures. In the last decades of
the twentieth century, agricultural expansion has represented a growing threat
for the ecosystem and for the people who inhabit it. Due to this process,
significant ecological changes, and social and demographic transformations, are
taking place, in parallel.
The aims of this paper are to analyze the socio-environmental change occurred
after the expansion of soybean cultivation in the Argentine Chaco in the 1990s,
and examine the consequences of such expansion in environmental and sociodemographic
processes.
To perform this analysis, we examined the relative impact of changes in agrarian
production in general and the introduction of soybeans in particular, on
demographic, socioeconomic and environmental dynamics, through path
analysis. This analysis carried out at departmental level, considering a total of 69
departments of the Argentine Chaco.
The development models of socio-environmental change and their interpretation
are based on the detailed analysis of the literature, where the main theories of
the issue were collected. The analysis consisted in contrast these hypotheses
with empirical data to finding a general pattern explaining the process of socioenvironmental
change for the Argentine Chaco in the 1990s.
The model developed explained a high percentage of variation between
departments in the growth of soybean and in its social and environmental effects.

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